luzula

EI ran out—the two-and-a-half months they didn’t have to pay me because I was doing temp work didn’t get added on to the end, as I’d hoped they might, and they didn’t total enough hours for a new claim. I had a job interview last week, and three the week before that, but so far no offers, so I’m now in the process of applying to Ontario Works, aka the dole. Which asks an array of questions on the form, and a consultation with them yesterday boiled down to “give the simplified answer, and once they assign you a caseworker you can tell them the more nuanced version.”

Meanwhile it’s the weekend, and this week was our twenty-first anniversary, so we went to the boardwalk for a few hours. I think I might have got a touch of sunstroke, even though I wore a hat and sunglasses and it was a few degrees cooler than it was when I was out and about on Thursday and Friday. Currently sitting in a dim room because the light in the living-room makes me dizzy.

David Hockney died this week—he was nearly eighty-nine, and had had as good a life as anyone could wish, but I’m still a little sorry he’s no longer around. I liked his paintings, and his book Secret Knowledge partly inspired my recent experiments with the Phantom Line 100.

I’ve been doing a series of paintings of traffic cones that I see around the city, in hopes that I can get them accepted for show somewhere—it’s hard to submit anything without a thesis statement but I think I can pretend the traffic cones are a comment on urban gentrification or something.

nnozomi posting in

guardian_learning

部首
阜/阝 part 1 fù
队, team; 防, to protect/to prevent; 阳, sun/positive ( pinyin )
https://www.mdbg.net/chinese/dictionary?cdqrad=170

词汇
错过, to miss; 错误, wrong/mistake ( pinyin )
https://mandarinbean.com/new-hsk-4-word-list/

Guardian:
以防万一我再陪护你最后一晚, just in case I'll keep you company for one more night
那是因为你们之前的办案方式都是错误的, that's because you people's previous investigation methods were all wrong

Me:
他笑得像阳光一样。
我们差点错过了飞机。

asakiyume

Wakanomori and I went to the Smith College Museum of Art the other day to see a Japan-related exhibit and ended up also seeing "Don't Mind If I Do," an exhibit centering disability and accessibility. The organizer, artist Finnegan Shannon, has created a space with bunches of comfortable chairs and couches arranged around a central space, and various objects move past you instead of you standing and walking past the objects. You're invited to touch them as well (... which I didn't realize until after).

At the entrance, a sign says "PLEASE WEAR A MASK IN THIS SPACE IN SOLIDARITY W/THE ARTISTS & FELLOW VISITORS."

There's a poem-statement on the walls:

Watch on YouTube

And here's the art moving by on a conveyor belt:

Watch on YouTube

( some of the individual pieces )

There was also an alcove with postcards of various art pieces. You were invited to write a postcard to someone about the exhibit, address it, and they would mail it for you (!)

Finnegan writes

Over and over when conceptualizing Don't mind if I do, I used the phrase "the artwork comes to you." But it doesn't really.

I, like many disabled people, am most often at home. Even under the best of circumstances, there are huge logistical, financial, and psychological access barriers to get to an art space. Things like exhaustion, sickness, transportation issues, COVID risk, distance, life responsibilities, doctors' appointments, and more all mean I miss a lot.

Mail art, a creative movement that involves sending art through the postal system, was and continues to be a way to experience art outside of institutions, a way to participate across time and geography. As ableism continues to isolate disabled people, mail art is a tool for connection.

The message is on the wall above the postcard instructions. Finnegan signs it, "With love from my bed."

I was surprised by how moving I found the concept and execution. It's at the Smith College Museum of Art (Northampton, MA) through June 28.

yourlibrarian

1) The past two days have been occupied. Yesterday we both had things to deal with after returning home -- plants to be seen to, laundry to be done, mail to be answered, etc.

Aside from completing the roof repair in just a day, maintenance brought us a dehumidifier to run. The first one worked for a while but then started leaking on the floor. We were able to get someone from maintenance just before they left for the day, and after they looked at it they just brought us a new one. ( Read more... )

2) After watching the first half hour of Canada versus Bosnia ( Read more... )

As far as the US versus Paraguay goes, ( Read more... )

Switzerland vs Qatar was interesting to me mostly in how it would affect Canada. ( Read more... )

3) Earlier in the week I saw the Pixar film "Hoppers." I found it a mixed bag. ( Read more... )

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kenjari

A Conspiracy of Truths
by Alexandra Rowland

This fantasy novel is told from the perspective of an old Chant, a wandering storyteller. During he and his apprentice Ylfing's sojourn in the northern (and Slavic-flavored) country of Nuryevet, Chant is falsely accused of witchcraft and then espionage, thrown in prison, and sentenced to death. Having no desire to come to such an end for things he did not do, Chant uses stories to manipulate his jailers, lawyer, and even the rulers of Nuryevet in order to take down their regime and free himself.
This was an ingenious "stories within a story" novel. Following what Chant was doing and how it worked was very enjoyable. Plus, the characters were amazing. Chant is a cantankerous old man, not always likeable, but I kind of loved him. He was grumpy and often self-serving, but he was also canny and perceptive. Ylfing was really sweet and adorable as teenage boys can sometimes be. I even liked the lawyer Consanza, who was very open about being out for herself and her family most of the time, but she was also very capable and good at working a situation. A Conspiracy of Truths is a really masterful examination of the power of stories and storytelling, which, as an avid reader, I was deeply into.

Current Mood: thirsty

itrytobe

a genuine diary extract:

A bit after 17:00, we could finally board our night train, SJ EuroNight 345, Stockholm-Berlin. We have berths 75 and 76 in carriage 21. There are crying babies in our carriage. Our first travel companion in our compartment is someone from the UK who's living in Stockholm for work. They're heading to Berlin for an ultimate frisbee tournament. Our second супутник joined us in Norrköping. They turned out to have lived in [Student City] for a while, a few years back.

S— took the top bunks and got ready for bed between 21:00 and 22:00. The final two passengers to our six-berth compartment boarded in Malmö, but I was asleep by then. I would not call this a comfortable way to travel, but I delight in the romance of pretending it's the 19th century.

( Next morning: )

Current Location: Stockholm-Hamburg

squidgestatus

We're going to implement a configuration change for SquidgeWorld Archive that will affect all users that post fanworks and allow comments. Long story short, the "Comment Moderation" functionality will be enabled for all new works by default. This is the one we mean:

Long story long, our recent influx of commission spammers, including the clown that we had to quash multiple times over the last two days, the commission artists no longer care if they use a valid email address. They just want to post their "Give me money for a commission!" and hope that you hit them up on Discord or such. In order to combat this, we are making the default for all new works to have comment moderation enabled. So if you get notification of a comment on your works, you can choose to display it manually after you approve or not. Enabling the behavior by default means it'll be turned on and all comments on that work moderated.

If you don't want the setting, you can simply uncheck it when posting your work, or go in after it's posted and then disable the setting.

This will happen during Sunday morning maintenance, which as always is every Sunday morning from 7am to 9am Pacific Time. Questions?

thistleingrey

Miss Congeniality (2000): first viewing, via the return of YouTube's "free with ads" sidebar suggestions (no ads appeared across the week or so that it took me to watch).

I rather liked the pageant parts, which have more nuance than what I recall of actual 1980s pageants---not saying much, but still; I managed not to hurt anything while rolling my eyes at the ostensible romantic subplot, which I think is presented deliberately as crap; and I thought about all the ink, air, and pixels that my grad colleagues used in theorizing "camp" in the late 1990s, fresh from reading Butler, Lacan, and so on.

Somehow, I went into this film completely unspoiled (aside from "There's a pageant"), and it suits me to note some things without major spoilers.

( but I'd better cut them, in case )

I (still) haven't seen all that many films, really, but I can't think of many formally lightweight comedies so intent on telling characters and audience alike: grow.

marina

1. I seem to have, tragically, read all the alpha/beta/omega fics that exist on AO3 for The Pitt. Or at least, all the fics that are within my reading parameters. Note, this is not ship-specific! I'm ship agnostic when it comes to this show. Anyway, this is a tragedy, I am very sad. It makes me want to write my own fic (other than the ones I've already written) just so there's more of that shit in the world.

2. I wrote a short story recently, for the first time since... many years. Definitely for the first time since 2019, probably more than that. But I sent it in to a local anthology and it got accepted. So it will be published, in print, later this year. I don't know where that puts me in relation to finding my way back to my own voice when it comes to original fiction, but it is happening. And it is nice.

Another thing that's nice is that I wrote this story in about 2 writing sessions, across 2 different days during the same week. Before, short stories used to take me on average 6 months. They were the woooorst. The shortest it ever took me, for a story I needed to submit purely for a technicality and that I knew I could "slack off" on, took about 2 weeks. That story will never see the light of day, and I'm totally OK with that lol.

So, mostly this feels like a huge achievement for me as a writer, that I've done so much practice with my original work that I'm now able to produce something "high quality" enough to get published within such a short time. It didn't start out this way! Despite being a born anxious pessimist reality keeps annoyingly proving to me that things can improve if you invest the time and effort.

3. They're having an actual Heated Rivalry party here this week - by which I mean, a nightclub is hosting a Heated Rivalry night - and I am actually considering going lol. The party starts at 11pm, which is normal! Except I'm 16-23 anymore, which is the age range when I was going to nightclubs in that format lolol It's just so rare to have a fandom event IRL like this, that is a draw. It's also nice that I told some coworkers about it lol. Like I don't know if any of us will come, but it's nice to have coworkers I can share this with.

4. Work is... in kind of a holding pattern. ( work )

5. I've watched so much TV lately, but of course my schedule is currently ruled by The Vampite Lestat. The absolute MASTERPIECE. I'm obsessed with this show and I've read zero fic for this show, which tells you all you need to know about how good the canon is. And I've been reading fic for this universe since I was a teenager!

( spoilers for 3x01 )

itrytobe

a genuine diary extract:

Me lähdettiin kolmeksi mummin luo kahville. Siellä olivat myös M—-eno sekä E—-serkku T—-poikaystävineen. E— on panssariprikaatin tiedustelujoukoissa MTLB-komentajana. Kyselin että ovatko asentaneet panssarivaunuihin drooninhäirintälaitteita.Ollaan kuulemma asennettu kun komentaja on sitä mieltä että on oltava drooninhäirintälaitteet (kuulostaa järkevältä), mutta niitä laitteita ei edes kytketty päälle (mitä hyötyä niistä sitten on...). Se armeijasta.

Current Location: Lahti

kenjari

The Cambridge Companion to Bach
edited by John Butt

This volume of essays did a good job of covering the immense subject of J. S. Bach, his music, and its importance in Western classical music. Given the vastness of the subject, I very much appreciated that the introduction laid out the context and aims of the volume, since there was no way it could be comprehensive. I especially enjoyed the essays that strove to give a sense of how Bach and his work was situated in the musical world of the 17th and 18th centuries.The discussions of Bach as a teacher were also really interesting.

Current Mood: hot

itrytobe

a genuine diary extract:

We happened across vegan restaurant Gopal. It has the usual buffet, but it's not the usual kind of all-you-can-eat: you fill a tray and then weigh it, and pay by weight. It's like €2.55 per 100 g, we got lunch for the both of us for something silly like €18.70. The food was great, and the crowd there was just the kind where we feel at home: queer and alternative. It was warm enough to sit outside.

After a pear ice cream at Tammelantori, it was finally time for the Moomin Museum. It revolved around the books and their illustrations. There were lots of original artworks and sketches [by Jansson], and dioramas constructed by Tuulikki Pietilä. I would have liked to learn a bit more about the, well, everything else: the comics, the merchandise, the impact on Jansson's further life and career, on Pietilä's life and career... But still, it was very much worth seeing. I bought a cheap pocket edition of Muumilaakson marraskuu from the gift shop. It's my favourite of the Moomin books and I'd like to have a copy in my own book collection.

We would've liked to see Pyynikki too, but it was a bit too far away. We just walked to Tammerkoski park and then to a restaurant for dinner. After that we had almost an hour to kull before our train, so we sat in the sun in the park again. S— fell in love with Tampere, she says she could live there.

Current Location: Tampere

itrytobe

a genuine diary extract:

Then we walked over to mummi for lunch. She told us more about mom's childhood and her own life. She was one of the few people in her family (after her older sister) to go to high school. They had to go to Oulu for that, which is 70 km away from the P— family farm near U—. She told us about ukki's family too. They are originally from Eastern Karelia, but they weren't war refugees: they moved to Lapland for work in the 1930s. That makes the timeline make sense, because I've heard stories about my grandfather L—'s brother E— befriending German soldiers in Lapland. (Though mummi did also mention there were Karelians who were evacuated during the Winter War, returned home in the välirauha, and then evacuated again during/after the Continuation War.) Mummi has worked in the Jyväskylä University library (she studied library science in Jyväskylä), but she was at the P— public library for most of her career.

Current Location: Lahti

itrytobe

a genuine diary entry:

We went to Jyväskylä to my aunt K—. We made it to the bus without problems, despite mummi's anxieties. The views from the bus were very nice, and I couldn't decide whether to read, look out the window, or nap. I had time to do all three during the two-hour ride.

We arrived in Jyväskylä at 14:05. We went into the bookshop first to buy some postcards, then we had a cup of tea at Café Miriam's, a nice local café/bakery. Aunt K— met us after her workday, at 15:30 (she works as an English teacher). She gave us a tour of the arts and humanities campus of the University of Jyväskylä, where her and mom studied English together. Siiri the dog came with us, she was very excited to meet us! K— drove us around Jyväskylä for a while and showed us the JYU's sciences campus, mom's old student house, and various neighbourhoods.

K— showed us around in her house, and we had dinner with uncle J—. K— hasn't seen me in 11 years and she's never met S— before, but she trusts us with her entire dog: we were allowed to take Siiri out for a walk unsupervised. Only it started raining and she refused to move.

J— had yoga and K— had zumba class. We went to sauna in the meantime. It felt so good, oh, I've missed it! The view from the kitchen and living room is amazing, you can see —järvi peeking through the forest. There are no landscape pictures on the walls, that would be tasteless in a house with such a view.

Current Location: Jyväskylä

itrytobe

a genuine extract from my diary:

Kerta-ajo-HSL-liput ovat voimassa puolitoista tuntia. Keksittiin ajaa ratikalla Kauppatorilta [minne saavuttiin lautalla] Aleksanterinkadulle kun kerran pysty. Että ollaan päästy kulkemaan kelta-vihreän helsinkiläisen raitiovaunun kyydissä! Väärään suuntaan kyllä. Takaisin/oikeaan suuntaan ajettiin mainospeitteisellä ratikalla.

Current Location: Helsinki

itrytobe

a genuine extract from my diary:

At 23:00 exactly, a shuttle took us straight into the ro-ro ferry. I hadn't at any point thought beyond getting on board – usually I just follow my parents. There was a reception desk on deck 7 though, and the cabin number (8039) was printed on the key card. We helped someone who introduced themself as M— – they were afraid to take the lift because they've been trapped in a lift all alone for three hours one time. We took their suitcases with is in the lift while they took the stairs. We left our own suitcases in our cabin and went to find the Late Night Dinner we'd booked. (We thought it'd be tomorrow night, but we're very happy to have it now.) The buffet was tiny, but the food was excellent.

This ferry, the Finnstar, seems smaller than the Stockholm-Helsinki ferries I remember. The car deck seemed small, and as far as I can tell there's just one central stairwell. Come to think of it, there's no promenade.

Current Location: Baltic Sea

mbb_mod posting in

marvel_bang

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blackcatofmisery posting in

everykindofcraft

For lack of better title... It could be a keychain; it could be a phone charm. Right now, it's hanging off of my phone.

After seeing a Tumblr post that stuck with me, I managed to find some alphabet beads that matched in color enough to recreate the words. Serendipitously, with three lines, the number of letters matched perfectly, otherwise I was considering sewing the words to fabric stretched on an embroidery hoop.

I think I did a modified square stitch, putting this all together. "Modified", because I think I did it backwards... It's holding together, and I can only hope my knots hold, so I don't drop beads like confetti out of nowhere.

(Original post. I only found this community recently and more recently decided to actually share on it.)

Current Mood: creative
Current Music: Eagles - Hotel California

ysabetwordsmith

The Angera Declaration for Methane Action

Methane is the second most significant contributor to warming, after carbon dioxide. Methane is responsible for 30% of current warming and its atmospheric concentration continues to rise. Absent rapid and sustained reductions, methane emissions will drive faster warming in the coming decades, intensifying climate risks such as more frequent and severe droughts and heatwaves; more rapid ice-sheet loss; sea-level rise; and risks of triggering destabilizing climate tipping points.

Reducing methane emissions not only reduces climate risks, it also almost immediately improves air quality by decreasing ground-level ozone, which improves public health by reducing respiratory illness and premature mortality while preventing crop losses from ozone exposure thus strengthening food security.

Because methane is so powerful a warming agent and so short-lived in the atmosphere, its reduction offers the biggest bang-for-buck on climate action. The vast majority of that action relies on government and industry efforts, but there are a few things that individuals can do with real impact...

( Read more... )

Current Mood: busy

shipperslist

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luzula

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